Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday November 03, 2011 @07:03PM
from the end-of-the-line dept.

Luyseyal writes "Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs Thursday as the company seeks to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas. This amounts to over 11% of its global workforce, including Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List."

It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.

So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.

Yeah, he needs to learn that trading on "news" is possibly even worse than trading completely at random. Besides if you look at the past 13 years of the stock market, you are just as likely to make money in the next 5 years or so by buying stock as you are by selling it. The market has been jogging in place since 1998.

The dead wood is mostly at the top, with some of stuck in middle management. The worker bees may or may not have some deadwood among them, but the majority of the deadwood is all located at the top. And, cost wise, cutting a little deadwood from the management structure saves more money than cutting a ton of deadwood from the bottom. One executive bonus equals about 20 employees annual salary these days, often times more!

No, but you might be a poor investor. Yes, it'll boost immediate returns but only by sacrificing long-term benefits. The benefit will be brief. It's things like this that are why investment is almost entirely cognitive illusion [guardian.co.uk] and not based on skill or rational thought. The ones who are any good work along selective inaction. Responding to the market is the worst thing you can do.

Sure, if you like to short stock. AMD can't seem to stop sucking for the past few years. They almost ate Intel's lunch, but he with the deepest pockets wins. Too bad that now they will take ATI with them if they go under.

As far as I know, they're not issuing new shares. If you buy AMD stocks... not a single penny of that goes to AMD unless it's AMD selling the share itself. You'd just be buying an old share that's already in circulation.What is accomplished in buying an AMD share from the stock market though is to show confidence in AMD as a company. This has a short term impact of helping to increase the value of the share enough to make it so that the controlling shareholders in the organization will not say things like "

I don't think that Intel has much to gain from buying AMD. As it is, the entire semiconductor sector is now commoditized, and there's not much of a future there. As you noted, the biggest threat to Intel is ARM, but Intel still has the PC market to itself, and buying AMD won't do squat to either help nor hurt it. Only thing that can hurt Intel is a paradigm shift to ARM on PCs - which can happen if MS ports Windows 8 and major applications to ARM. But given that they didn't do that w/ Windows NT, I don'

Sure MS has "ported windows to ARM" but IIRC they are planning to make windows 8 arm metro only and will not be implementing any form of compatibility layer for running x86 apps on it. So unless everyone suddenly ports their apps to metro/arm the windows port won't really help arm's prospects on the desktops.

I am going to fire a bunch of people to save x millions of dollars over the next 3-5 years but right now I am going to pay out x millions (yea it is often a similar number) right now to give a bonus to a multi millionaire who doesn't need it.

The worst part is that next year they pay the bonus out again, and again all while the company loses money.

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away. But you almost never here about a CEO or board, or congress who is willing to put the company(or country) before their own salary.

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%

In the prosperous 1960s, CEOs made about 30x the salary of the average worker for the same company.

Today, it goes higher than 1000x.

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future. It's stunning, really, to hear how out of whack our system has become thanks to the laissez-faire, supply-side, "trickle-down" economics that have been the policy of every US government since 1980.

It's the kind of intractable, illogical, unjust mess that can make people very angry.

And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future.

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

OK, I noticed that yesterday and today there were two national polls taken that show if the elections were held today, the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and Obama would be re-elected. Do you believe that the elections should be cancelled because you don't believe that decision is wise or meaningful?

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

Every one of us has a stake in the output of elections. We benefit or are hurt to varying degrees. We vote based upon our own interests.

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful"? Or will we have a system where people have some say in the way they are governed?

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern.

Since all corporations make "short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern" then you must agree that they should not be allowed to participate in elections at any level, including financially. Especially since corporations are not citizens.

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

No, it's not ironic at all, as greece most certainly is a functioning and healthy democracy.

What you're talking about is DIRECT democracy (also known as "mob rule"), which, while it has some pros, has far more cons. Voting for representatives, who then make decisions for you, is still

That's why I don't get the tea party hate, the ones who want to stop bail outs and listen to their people.

B B B BUT THEYRE RACIST!! goebels was right, repeat it enough times.

The OWS has more in common with the tea party than democrats.

The Tea Party had it right by being angry; they just had it wrong by being angry at the wrong people. Tea Partiers are mostly people who bought into the great lie that governments, and unions, are always inefficient and can't do anything right. They took that lie and ran with it to the "obvious" conclusion: if there's a problem in the US, then the government and the unions must be the cause of it, and if we get rid of them, thereby handing all our power and wealth to the only large collective entities left

I doubt it will and they're beginning to show their ineptitude. Their plans I've seen so far for cold weather has been humorously misguided. The one example that comes straight to mind is asking for cots to get people off the cold ground. They have devices to connect to the Internet and they can't even get info on the types of preparation they need for cold weather. They're just children, even if they are 18 years of age, who have no idea about the world around them.

They're just children, even if they are 18 years of age, who have no idea about the world around them.

Day before yesterday, there was published a profile of the 800+ Occupy protestors that were arrested.

They are not children. They are not unemployed. They are middle-class and homeowners. They come from poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods. There are military veterans, firefighters, teachers, nurses. In other words, the people that used to make up the middle-class, back when we had a middle-class.

You make a very good point, friend. German workers retire earlier than Greek workers and the German economy is even more worker-friendly than the southern-European governments. They are every bit as "socialist" as France or Italy or Greece or Sweden, yet they are strong enough to lead Europe economically.

They one big difference is that Greece doesn't tax its rich people and Germany does. In fact, there are a bigger percentage of millionaires and billionaires with Greek residency as any other EU country just for that reason.

There's a huge difference between Greece and Germany other than the system itself. It's the Mediterranean syndrome. I've been to multiple areas of Greece several times. I have been to many cities in Germany and have worked with Germans for years. I have been to many western and central European countries and there are some things which are just plain obvious and any northern Italian will gladly tell you it's true.

The further south you get in Europe, the lower your motivation seems to be. Just last month I was in Crete and I'm not joking, all the frigging stores close in the middle of the day and all the coffee shops and bars fill up. Drivers of trucks on the island stop driving in the middle of the day and stop to have a glass of stong wine or moonshine. The only people working on the entire island at that time of day is the restaurant staff.

It is similar in many places in Spain as well. Malta..... well let's not bother with Malta and Gozo. Southern Italy as well.

On the other hand, if you go to Germany, from the time the day starts, you work and you're efficient. People take pride in their efforts. They set standards for themselves which are high and they achieve the goals they set for themselves. Germany's biggest problem is the cleanliness of their cities. People don't walk the extra 3 steps to make it to a trash can, but there are a lot of workers cleaning up the streets most of the time, so it's not that big of a problem.

Sure taxing the rich would help a bit in Greece, but size of the numbers we're talking about in Greece, if you taxed the entire top 5% of the country a total of 25% of their gross worth each year, it wouldn't touch it. The problems are much bigger than that and they would have to fix it by making people actually change their ways. The goal isn't to tax the people themselves but to produce things in a way which would bring money into the country. Closing down the parasitic tourist industry which barely works in Greece would be a great start.

Nearly every island in Greece is supported by the tourist industry which exists for about half the year. A waiter at a restaurant I frequented in Crete let me know that his personal income after tips is 12,000 euro per year. He works 14 hours a day 6 days a week during the tourist season to accomplish this and he's highly motivated and a hard worker. Problem is, when the winter comes, he uses his savings during that time for food and necessities and then uses oil he produces in his parents green house to heat his apartment on their property.

These establishments are supported by hotels built, maintained and later abandoned by owners in other countries. These companies exploit cheap labor and build these massive resorts at disgustingly low rate and perform all transactions outside of Greece to avoid paying the Greek taxes and costs of maintaining the money in multiple countries. They fly people from richer countries into Greece using their own airlines (or from other companies similar to their own like Thomas Cook) and their excuse is that they're bringing tourist money to Greece and helping the economy. The problem is, when the economy strengthens in a given area, the resort company practically closes down the last hotel and builds a new one further down the beach where the local workers are willing to work for less money. They don't totally abandon their old hotels, but they'll attempt to sell them to lesser resort companies which have a lower level of patrons with less purchasing power.

These resorts also do everything they can to make a closed environment where they cater to a specific nationality. So the German hotels have German restaurants with German beer and German speaking staff. The Scandinavian hotels have Swedish food with Swedish speaking staff and Swedish convenience stores. They do this so that their guests will be less likely to spend their money outside of the hotel and instead spend a great deal more inside of the hotel. They also attempt to build these hotels as far as possible from cities. Th

All the nicest forests are already harvested. All the easy wells, dams, bridges and reservoirs are already built. Any further growth is either going to be very, very expensive or is going to put a lot of strain on existing resources.

And all the good wells have been drilled. Blah blah.

People innovate. That's what they do. But innovation comes from healthy societies and with increasing income disparities and growing populations of economically threatened people, we are not a healthy society.

Attracting income is a separate skill from creating wealth. Wealth is designed and built and grown, and the people who generate it design and build and grow. It's written and painted and sung.

There are people who can only attract income and social position. They're the ones who think it's smart to get other people to generate the wealth but keep the income for themselves. They call themselves "the productive people".

When you are going hungry, I challenge you to eat a painting and see how nutritious it is.

I see it differently. I see it as there are people who are lazy - either physically or intellectually - and people who can motivate others to get them to do things for them. It's not a King's job to die in a battle, it's a soldier's. And with the right type of King, people will gladly give up even their lives. For a charismatic religious leader they are willing to blow themselves up - they think its for a god but rea

I agree. In fact there are a lot more mediocre managers than good ones. So imagine how good the really good ones are, that they manage to achieve something DESPITE the bad ones. Eh I'm hardly partial - I'm married to a "good" senior manager at a Fortune 500. You would not believe (no, actually you would) the shit that goes on. Politics, favoritism, nepotism, good people getting fired for no reason to make room for "friends", etc. All that is part of shitty management, and we end up paying for it. But in the

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Yes, like Iceland did. Just look how bad it turned out for them... oh wait, it DIDNT.

The "market" is paying less attention to Greece than the news media would have you believe. Other things like Bernanke's announcement of QE3 (sorry they call it accommodation now), increased productivity (+3.1%) and factory orders (+0.3%) have much more impact on the market than Greece. Have to buy now before printing-press driven inflation sends prices up even further, especially when the promise of more cheap money is on the horizon. But all the press sees is the "drama" in Greece. And of course this work

Where you should direct your ire, is at large gov entities: Freddie/Fannie, Fed Res, IRS, DHS, DOD, etc. Those are the leeches destroying our economy.

Not CEOs.

Ha hahaha HAHAHAHA

I haven't laughed so hard in an age. Greedy CEOs who literally make millions in salary increases and bonus the same day they shaft their workforce aren't the problem. It is those meddling government men......and pigs fly QANTAS. Or rather run the damn airline.

how do you think all of those large government entities you listed are destroying the economy?

If you believe that they are, which you seem to, then it should be obvious that they are destroying the economy basically by funneling money to large corporations at taxpayer expense. Large corporations are, of course, run by "greedy CEOs", who use their undue influence to make sure they are funneled lots of money at taxpayer expense.

source please? While I agree upper management is way overpayed, from what I can see the average is still around 30-50 times. seriously what companies are paying 1000x? at that rate even the less highly skilled industries would have to be paying close to 100 million or more per CEO?

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

Not just economically, socially as well. Remember when one person could provide for a family? That meant that the other person was able to not work and be a full time parent. Now we have problems with children's behaviour and have to prop up families where both parents work with benefits and subsidised child care just to make bringing up the next generation feasible for an average family.

why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away.

And that way upper management will all quit and go work somewhere else, and the company won't have managers left (except of course the bad ones who can't go anywhere else). Believe it or not, management is actually an important part of a company. They don't just sit on their asses all day and tell people to get to work on time.

The question is how much are they worth. Are they worth 1,000 times the cost of the labour actually doing the work and earning the profits, keeping in mind management is a overhead not a profit centre and 1,000 additional worker could be earning a profit. It is easy to see how corporate executive remuneration has been corrupted via collusion and multiple appearances of the same psychopathic executives faces on the boards of multiple companies.

The problem with talent is that the rate is set by your competitor - not by you. It's not how much is it worth to your company - it's how much is your competitor willing to pay. Certainly management is worth the value of the whole company, because the whole company would cease to exist without it. That's the difference really between line workers and management. You can pretty much be guaranteed homogenity across factory workers - their skills are largely dependent on culture and education of the society yo

That would have to either the funniest or most psychopathic response I have ever had. It's like government bailouts have never happened (banks, savings and loans, car manufacturers) or "golden parachute" is an unknown term or "dotbomb" never heard of it. It is becoming pretty apparent psychopathic corporate executives are only interested in creating an illusion of how well the companies they are running are doing, sucking a huge salary out of investors, creating a complete insane you are fired package for

Seriously though I agree with you that a lack of accountability is what is driving the inequities in the system. The fact that shareholders, who are the (initial) investors, have absolutely no say in the day to day operation of the corporation but rather elect people to do this for them by proxy, opens the corporate assets to be pilfered for personal gain, just like the people's assets are pilfered by politicians. When access to a lot of money is too easy, that money is j

never said it wasn't. managers and especially good mangers are tough to find.

however no one is worth 1,000 times the janitor. without whom the place literally turns to shit. No one is worth 800 times the salesmen who actual drive the profits. or the workers without whom your orders don't actually get filled.

For this Circuit city is my favorite punching bag. They fired all their top salesmen, to save money hired new people, paid out bonuses at like 75% of the money they saved by firing people to the board, and a little over a year later declared bankruptcy.

All you've done is list "outsourcing" over and over. And that isn't even the cause, it's the symptom. The problem is that we need to adopt policies that make hiring Americans more competitive, but most of those policies aren't as egalitarian or redistributive as people might like.

Let me give you some examples:

We take the principle that everyone deserves a quality education, so we take the resources (tax revenue) that we have for education and try to divide it equally between all students. But some jobs require a better education than others. Complete fairness is not a competitive advantage. You can create a basic level of education in everyone without striving for perfect equality: It would be far better to have schools for smart kids that we spend substantially more per student on, and schools for less smart kids that we spend less money on. It doesn't really matter that the future retail workers don't have a strong grip on calculus. It does really matter that the future doctors and engineers don't because we reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.

Likewise, you look at the nominal corporate income tax rate. It's one of the highest in the world. Then you look at the effective corporate tax rate. For multinational corporations it's extremely low (because the nature of a multinational corporation allows them to report profits in lower-tax countries), but for smaller corporations it's much higher. It puts US small business -- who employ the largest number of Americans -- at a disadvantage compared to multinationals. Eliminating the corporate income tax would create no benefit to large corporations (which already don't pay it), but would help the job-creating small businesses that do. But the national feeling is that large corporations should pay more taxes, and we can't actually do that in a way that doesn't have ruinous side effects (e.g. tax on gross rather than net income), so keeping up appearances forces us into the charade that causes actual harm to small business. (The problem is that the only kind of tax you can force a high-mobility corporation to pay is a consumption tax on their products -- you can tax them on their customers that are in your jurisdiction. But that burden is then shared in part by customers, and that tends to raise the price of goods in a regressive way.)

The general problem is that we try to make everything fair on paper, but what is fair is not always what is competitive. There is sometimes a trade off between more jobs and more equality, and we have to be willing to admit that before we can make a rational decision about which is more important and when.

Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay. It's all a matter of deciding that it needs to be done. And, THAT isn't going to happen so long as politicians and corporate chiefs are smart enough to make politicians wealthy secretly.

"Congressman, I don't know how I can ever repay you for your tax break support. How about we invite your daughter to sit on our board of directors? Oh, no sir, that can't possibly be called

Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay.

No you can't. Profits are defined as revenues minus costs. What multinational companies do is to pay a sister company in another jurisdiction for products or services. The sister company makes a big profit on the transaction, the US company offsets almost all of their US revenues with it, but it's a legitimate product or service that they actually need. They just arrange to buy it from a sister company.

So you want to stop it, how do you do it? The first attempt would be to say that costs paid to non-US companies should not be able to offset US revenues. The effect of that is very similar to an import tariff. It probably violates a list of treaties as long as your arm and it would have all the countries that sell to us screaming bloody murder. On top of that, you would quickly get scams where a nonprofit conducts a "fund raiser" where they buy foreign goods and then resell them in the US at low margins to 'raise money' but really to import the goods without paying the tax and then sell them to a US company that in effect donates the nonprofit's 2% margin to charity instead of paying 35% in tax. To fix that you would have to make it even more like an import tariff, and good luck with that.

So let's make it more targeted at the problem then. Make it so only costs paid to foreign companies that are in the same corporate family tree can't be deducted against US revenues. But now if Volkswagen manufactures a car in Germany and sells it in the US, they pay income tax on the whole cost of the car because the cost is paid to their own German subsidiary, whereas if Toyota manufactures in Alabama from US parts they only pay income tax on the profit instead of the whole cost of the car. That still seems like a problem, international relations wise.

So we need to not discriminate against foreign products. The way you do that would be to impose a tax on just revenues and not allow anyone to deduct any costs. That wouldn't discriminate against foreign products, but "tax on revenue" is a synonym for "sales tax." I don't think that's what we were going for.

I'm not in the USA, but I really would like to point out that those people are already in your country. There's nothing that can be done to move them out of the country (and your economy would collapse furthur if there was anyway) so reality has to be faced and they have to get some sort of place in society. You can't close the floodgates any more than George III could when he wanted to stop the colonies expanding beyond the Appalachians. It may suck but it comes down to trying to get the best of some bad choices. The USA is far too addicted to low priced low skilled labour anyway, and while that continues there will be very little done to stop the trend at any level. Even senators have disposable servants at less than the minimum wage who can't complain or they might get deported. Making them illegal immigrants instead of just immigrants like a century ago actually makes things worse. The bottom is getting pegged lower and lower and as you say there has been a lot of deliberate destruction of the middle class as part of a race towards what looks more and more like a parody of Feudalism.

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.

What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."

Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "e

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.

What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."

Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up. These days shareholders are largely incapable of enforcing a long-term perspective on executive officers; the rules these days are written by boards more interested in hiring a CEO for a few quarters to juice profits, siphon as much money as they can, and let the CEO take a multi-billion dollar golden parachute to the next sucker play. This quarter-to-quarter thinking isn't fostered by pensioners in

Long term, the goons sitting in the lofty cream layer will notice more and more that their branches are getting thin.Richard Wolff has some good facts how this come together - or not, as it stands right now.

Ah, I thought PIII was pretty solid, it was just bloody expensive. I seem to recall the frequencies going up faster and the prices being cut more often once the athlon started to get a decent chunk of the market.

P4/netburst was a shitsack, though, especially the early ones. IIRC the 1GHz or 1.13GHz, whatever was top of the line at the time, PIIIs were still blowing the first gen P4s out of the water... pathetic.

I encourage everyone to read The Lights In the Tunnel, as a primer on the coming age of technologically driven systemic unemployment.

Think of an idealized chip factory/company. The machines run themselves, AI systems design ever better version; raw material goes in one side and pallets of CPUs come out the other side.

This is a 100% capital intensive business, and has almost zero labor requirements. We're not there yet, obviously, but every year we'll get closer. Companies will be able to do more with less workers, prices will drop, and supply will be limited only by how much resources you have to turn into chips. That's ONE side of the equation. The other side is that such an efficient and streamlined business is destined to quickly go bankrupt.

In a capitalist economy, every worker is also a consumer. There will be no other sector of the economy to shunt those unemployed workers to, especially not at the level they were employed at previously, because all the other businesses have gone capital-intensive too. Strangely, the most secure jobs will be the lowest paid and traditionally least desirable jobs such as janitors, cleaners, cooks, and other services. It's actually easier to build an automated chip factory than it is to produce a robot that can do everything a human janitor can do. When you lay off a worker, you're also getting rid of a potential customer. Now, one business doing this when all the others don't would benefit and outcompete the others. So to keep up, they all have to become more efficient (which in modern times means becoming less labor intensive). Each business doing what's best for itself in isolation ends up ruining everything for everyone. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, but it's applied to the mass market itself as the common good, something that most mainstream economists, politicians, and citizens don't yet accept.

This is a 100% capital intensive business, and has almost zero labor requirements.

I've been in a couple of industries very close to that - steelmaking and electricity generation. In both industries there are many examples of bad management fucking things up by obsessing over wages and turning profitable operations into abandoned buildings.If something works and you want it to continue to you should learn which bits keep it working before you cut it to pieces.

"This comes after the arrival of a new chief executive and it is after the successful introduction of new products, so it is about right-sizing the company," said analyst Cody Acree with Williams Financial Group in Austin.

"You don't cut until you have done all the work you need to get new products out," he said. "But once you have them out and have identified what you need to do to keep moving forward, then you have more of a reason to go ahead and take job actions. You don't want to make the cuts before the CEO gets in, and you don't want to make the cuts before you get the products out. Now that those two are passed, it is time to get the cost structure in line with the rest of the fabless semiconductor industry"

This a**hole talks about the layoffs as one would discuss tree pruning. I guess that the whole "anal-yst" trade group is full of psychopaths, devoid of any humanity.

AMD is now a fabless company. That means what it does is DESIGN CHIPS. When Hector took over, the K8 design was so far along all he did was focus on marketing it. That's an easy job when your new design is better than the competition. He didn't focus on maintaining fab capability and AMD is now a full generation behind Intel. He didn't focus on new design, so AMD is now behind Intel. So now that they're fabless, the only thing they do is design (and drivers for the GPU side). So this new guy apparently thin

You prune a tree to keep to keep what is left healthy and doing what it should, if you don't you risk it dying or getting in the way and needing to be cut down. The only reason the same analogy is remotely contentious with companies and lay-offs is because the things you prune are sentient. I worked for a company that was bought and shut down. It couldn't turn a workable profit, in part because it was over-staffed and the pay and benefits were excessive. A cleaner earned over £40,000pa (admittedly by

I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.

Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.

Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California but non-disclosure is something entirely different. Former AMD employees will never be allowed to disclose proprietary information (trade secrets, business plans, etc) of AMD.

So, they all need to go get the job they prefer, then wait for AMD to file suit, and fight it.

Personally, I have zero respect for any non-compete clauses. The company claims to have rights and authorities regarding employment, whether it's written into a contract or not. And, the employee has none.

Around the world, if a company decides to fire you or lay you off, you find out two minutes before you are on the pavement, wondering what just happened. BUT - if you plan on moving to another job, the company

That is something I'd never heard before. Sounds reasonable to me. "Runaway, we don't need you anymore, you're fired (or laid off). You just go on to the house, and we'll send you a paycheck next Friday, and the next, then you're on your own."

Here, in the US, you can drive to work in the morning, pick up your tools, or sit at your desk, and the boss comes along, hands you your notice, and escorts you out the door. In such cases, you generally don't even get paid for showing up at work. The more conside

Bring in detailed plans on a USB and it's easy to prove by your former employer. Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with...." are certainly not easy to prove. Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.

In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.

Trade secrets involve more than just schematics and diagrams. Long term plans are also trade secrets and if you think Intel is dumb enough to try that, you are an idiot. Intel has itself gone after people who have left them to go to AMD for trying to steal trade secrets. They aren't going to open themselves up to similar lawsuits. They'll throw that employee to the wolves and let them enjoy the lawsuit from AMD.

In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.

Except that people have been successfully prosecuted for doing that. But hey, go ahead and try it. I'm sure you'll love losing that lawsuit as you get thrown under the bus.

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

So, you're saying that if some company hires an ex AMD employee and then doesn't do something (in secret) that AMD did do (in secret) then when it inevitebly gets leaked that the company simply didn't do something that's a trade secret of AMD, the company will be sued for not doing something because they shouldn't have not done it

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

So, you're saying that if some company hires an ex AMD employee and then doesn't do something (in secret) that AMD did do (in secret) then when it inevitebly gets leaked that the company simply didn't do something that's a trade secret of AMD, the company will be sued for not doing something because they shouldn't have not done it because it's a secret that it shouldn't be done except that if they do do it then they get sued because they shouldn't have done it because whatever it was, it was a trade secret, along with the knowledge that you should never do it, whatever it was.

Intel's certainly done well at keeping up a legitimate release schedule in the last five years, especially for a company with no real competition at all,

Huh what? No real competition?

Firstly, it's been less than 5 years since the core2 was released, which was when Intel started to make their big comeback in performance (though sales never seemed to be a problem for some reason...).

On the server, it's still very hard to beat the density, price and performance and power draw offered by a good Teir II (e.g. Su

Well, they're so busy donating to Obama hoping for GE-like tax subsidies... of course the GOP won't support them.

Maybe they'll consider that next election. If you're going to pick a winner, then be prepared to live with the consequences.

As to the rest of your idiotic rant, its Obama that bailed out all the banks and financial institutions, but I guess you're too busy playing with your iPhone to notice.

That's what I'm talking about - the first bailout was passed while he was still running for President. Well done, you prove my point with emphasis of calling me an idiot.

The GOP through the George W. Bush years didn't care much for California (or really much else of the country) It's largely assumed because despite a great many republicans living in California, many of whom are very conservative, the state appears to the rest of the country as Liberal or Moderate at the very most, so not a lot of interes

I wouldn't count AMD out just yet. They've delivered on combining the CPU and GPU and their integrated GPU is far more powerful than Intel's. Their CPUs are lacking but if they can catch up to Intel a bit, they already have all the other pieces in place and will be in a very strong position to compete, so I wouldn't count them out just yet.

TFA doesn't even mention Mark Langsdorf. His LinkedIn profile [linkedin.com] still shows him employed at AMD, and so does his homepage [prismnet.com]. So where did the news that he's been sacked come from?

He's a friend of mine. I know him socially through my wife. I'm not on LKML but that was one of the first things that comes up when you Google for Mark Langsdorf. I just thought that tidbit might be 1) interesting to slashdotters and 2) garner him some attention in getting a new job.